Stabs at Happiness (11 page)

She looked around, not really knowing what she was looking for, and suddenly knew that they'd stolen her wig. She started laughing. She wondered if they knew who she was, or if they'd been too dumb to figure it out. They could try to blackmail her, she supposed, but she wasn't very worried about it. After all, her reputation was that of a slut, a hot number and all of that… The revelations of some grifters wouldn't mean much, even supposing that anyone would listen. She wouldn't give them a dime.

Jean washed herself, slowly and thoroughly, groaning gently at times, lost in basic animal life. The numbness was gradually wearing off, so that emotions came to her a little more directly than at second or third remove. She felt a kind of astonishment wrapped in gauze, a muffled or subdued fascination with what she had done with herself: she thought she ought to feel more different than she in fact did.

And then, as she finally got up the nerve to call Arthur Landau, her agent, collect at his home – she felt somehow amused, she could hardly keep from laughing out loud as she put through the call.

She wanted Landau to wire her $500 via Western Union. He said he'd send her the Pullman fare back to Los Angeles plus $50, no more. Jean asked to speak to his wife, Beatrice, who she thought would be a softer touch.

“Of course,” she said to Arthur, “I guess if I really wanted to I could earn a couple hundred pretty easy, hardly working up a sweat.”

Landau digested this, then said: “All right, I'll send you a hundred. I give in, okay, but only to stop you from talking like that.”

“Then make it the five,” she said, using her tough-girl voice. “Or do you want to hear about how much I've already given away for free?”

“Christ, Jean, what's got into you? Be reasonable. You hurt me when you talk like that. I don't like to think of you doing these things to yourself.”

“I know what I'm doing.”

“No you don't, but that's not the point. Listen, I'll have the ticket waiting for you at the Southern Pacific ticket office by this afternoon, all right? Beatrice and I will be here at the station when you get off.”

“Arthur, you listen. I want three hundred, or else forget the whole thing. I'm not kidding. I know a Mexican guy who wants to take me down to Tijuana, introduce me to some people down there. I told him I don't tan, but he says I'll never have to go outside again.”

“I'll send you the money,” said Landau, and Jean felt bad about having pushed him but pleased he had given in. She tried to smooth things over. She promised to be good.

When she got off the phone, her mouth was so dry it felt as if all of her bodily fluids had dried up. As soon as the money came, she needed to get something good to drink. In the meantime, she settled for some water.

The Buck Rogers Disintegrator Ray Gun was on the floor next to the bed. She picked it up and pulled the trigger, aiming at the mirror, but the toy had been broken sometime during the night.

She bruised easily. There were blue and violet marks on her skin, as if she had been roughly handled. Her thigh-muscles were sore.

Now everything was gray. As it got darker, the gray would turn to black. Once vision became obsolete, the other senses would have to be developed to a higher level of sensitivity. Hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Eyes shut tight, groping about in the pitch black. A noise, a taste, a smell. The touch of the earth.

I
T WAS THE BEST
job he had ever had. Way out in the middle of nowhere, in an underground lab beneath the desert—he didn't know if the site was in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or Nevada… but it didn't matter, because he had no desire whatsoever to come up out into the air.

Pavel was supposed to be in charge of security, and he slept there, surrounded by video monitors of the console. The place was incomplete, funding had never been approved to finish construction or fill in the rest of the staff. Pavel sat, looking off into the cool darkness of the huge chamber, his cot and hot plate on a raised platform in a warehouse-like space empty but for giant spools of cable, scaffolding, and wooden crates of unknowable equipment, and he petted his cat, drank his tea, and was content.

In another section, there was some activity, some scientists and scientific types, but Pavel rarely came in close contact with them. To take a shower or fetch food from the pantry, he had to go through their area, and he nodded at them, they knew who he was, but he was not here to socialize. He got enough of their conversation from the surveillance devices, voice-activated microphones, and the like.

For some reason, when the engineers had built the showers, they'd built them outscale, so that the cubicles were some 15 feet deep and the water cascaded down from 20 feet or so up in the air… although the controls had been installed at a reachable level, perhaps as a last-minute stopgap. Pavel loved these showers, loved the smooth turquoise tiles: it was the kind of shower in which sacrificial Aztec victims would have washed themselves, with aloe soap, before climbing the steps of the pyramid to joyfully give their red hearts to the beating sun.

He waited, sometimes, until he was pretty dirty, to make the clean feeling more intense. He and his cat, a Siamese, communicated by a rough telepathy—rough in that sometimes it did not work—and Pavel waited, the distant ceiling a hundred feet above his platform, no lights up there, waited as his animal stalked mice and other small prey. He had an arsenal, but he hadn't cleaned any of the guns in months. He had submachine guns, tear-gas, stun-grenades, and a rocket-launcher he'd built from a kit.

He made no effort to keep track of the days and weeks and months. He read no books, magazines, or newspapers, listened to no radio, watched no television… unless, of course, his monitors counted as television… as no doubt they did, in some sense, as he did watch them, if intermittently and erratically… those images formed on his retina, and were registered there, and back on through the nervous circuitry into his brain—though to what end, or, if waiting for something, waiting for what, he could not have said.

He had his irregular routines. Certain tunnels to explore, leading off into the old mine shafts; his austere meals to prepare; his tea; his important naps; time spent following his cat about. Time was like a viscous clear fluid, and if specks of matter changed shadow or shape within this fluid, metabolizing or undergoing metamorphosis, still the fluid was indistinguishable from what it had been before, even if there seemed added some faint sense of flavor, or tang.

So, when the terminal suddenly came to life with a clatter and printed a message, Pavel wasn't sure how to respond. Certainly he was prepared to obey, to run through the drill, whatever the drill might turn out to be, but there was a good moment during which it seemed he had forgotten how to read.

Then the message organized itself into: P NOT Q. ACTION TO TAKE: PICK UP SCHULTZ AT AIRPORT, 0900. QUERY?

He had none. Since it was not the Q protocol, there was really nothing to ponder. The next morning, he would have to ascend, and drive in. He could remember Schultz, just barely. There was no reason to set an alarm. At 0600 he was up and about. None of the scientific crew seemed to be awake.

He took the elevator to ground level, and was not surprised that the battery in the pickup truck was dead. He fixed this, filled up with gas, and set out. The sun was on the horizon, the morning sky lavender, leaving shadows of tangerine and rose upon the peach-hued landscape of sand, rock and dust. He left a big plume of dust behind him as he headed toward the mappable roads. When he pulled onto the well-worn asphalt highway his mind was clear and clean, he saw a big truck pulling a double silver trailer that said PIKE'S, and he went the other way, caught up in the minute, instantaneous tensions of driving, trying to drive rightly as if judged by some higher law of harmony between vehicle, traffic, and road.

Pavel witnessed an early-morning shining lake mirage, and this blended into a real memory, the first in a while… he was in the distant mountains at the festival of Gobardan, with its displays of colored lights and huge puppets, the children begging candy. If you didn't have any, they would sing a jeering little song at you, and harass you as much as they could, tolerated and even abetted, with laughter, by the adults. The cattle were painted, and decorated with garlands of flowers. Many people wore elaborate animal masks, and took part in various dances and rites. There was one ceremony which had made a tremendous impression on Pavel—in a sense he had been trying to figure it out ever since. He couldn't get it out of his mind. There was a young mother, incidentally pretty, nude, with short dark hair… and she was lying down, in good humor, her belly rubbed with crimson ochre, and she drew up her knees as a tame male roebuck came and stood there in front of her, in a symbolic position, and all of this was taking place in a cavern, lit by hundreds of candles, the walls painted with figures—Pavel could still remember some of the music, the women's chorus in the thin air outside, as they all came out, Pavel spellbound, under a baroque profusion of stars, all blinking and counterblinking, in clusters and bunches, lively and shining, and he had caught the eye of the girl, the young mother, her dark eyes had looked into his, he couldn't hold her gaze and looked down to the shark's-teeth necklace she was wearing, it couldn't have been shark's-teeth so far from the ocean, more likely wolf or panther—and somehow, witnessing the shining lake mirage and recalling the ceremony made him realize, today, that an intention, or capacity of intention, was forming within him, that the muscle of will's contraction was all but spent, ready to spring back… and, alert, he caught a glimpse of a road-runner amid the flat sands and cacti, the spiky flowers and rock formations, rocks turning carnelian or dried-blood red with iron, greenish with malachite, gray or bleached like bones.

Civilization: telephone wires, power lines, road signs, the occasional service station, a billboard or two, more and more automobiles—Pavel saw that he was nearing the airport, outside the city, and he looked at his watch and saw that he was on time.

When Schultz deplaned, the last passenger to do so, Pavel nodded, and Schultz recognized him too. Schultz was a big, heavy man, with glasses, a round, almost piggish head, receding dark hair, and red, meaty lips which seemed to evidence a need to eat and drink and talk. He would not have been an attractive man to women, but he nevertheless held himself with a certain arrogance, or spoiledness; and Pavel had seen this type before.

Soon they were in the vehicle, heading for the project, and Schultz reached over to turn on the radio: a country weeper commenced. They continued, but in a few minutes Schultz interrupted Pavel's reverie by a question.

“What do you think about vengeance?”

Pavel considered this seriously, then saw that there was no reason for a serious answer, and said, “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Schultz said, “I was just thinking about that song.” And as if in afterthought: “It's hard to be sinless, no matter where.”

Pavel had no comment, and the DJ spoke for a while; another song came on, whereupon Schultz said,

“So how're things going? I mean, how is the work?” The familiarity seemed forced.

“As I understand math,” Pavel replied, “if we had twice as many people, we could get the same job done in half the time.”

“Correct,” Schultz said. “Or: approximately.”

And nothing else was said for many miles.

“You know,” Schultz began, perspiring, loosening his tie, “when people commonly believed in witches, there was an overwhelming body of evidence which seemed to support this, support belief in magic and witchcraft.”

Pavel didn't see what he was getting at. But Schultz seemed disturbed, with something on his mind. There was air conditioning but he seemed to be becoming increasingly warm.

“Opposites attract,” he went on. “this is what causes perpetual motion. Destruction is good, and goodness destructive. That kind of thing.” He was looking out the window, squirming around, developing a tic in his neck and shoulders and head.

“Where are all the animals?” he asked. “I thought I'd see some gila monsters, coyotes, packs of wild dogs, or red deer.”

In a few moments he began to suffer a sort of seizure, gasping and trembling and contorting, and Pavel pulled over to the side of the road, pushing Schultz away once when the man clutched at him with hot hands.

His body settling down, Schultz spoke, slumped against the door, in an unusual voice. It sounded as if he said his name was Slog. The tic continued, and he said, having difficulty getting it out, that he was from a distant planet, and that he controlled part of the brain of Schultz.

Pavel listened, demonstrating his attention, aware of the loaded .38 he had at his disposal in a little holder under the seat. The easiest thing might be to have Schultz dig his own grave, then put him in it. After all, this wasn't really Schultz. It was the wrong Schultz.

“What planet did you say you were from?”

“Arco,” it sounded like, and Pavel recalled that that was the last service station they'd gone past.

“We have to go back,” he said. “The airport's as far as I can take you.”

Schultz seemed to be regaining his earthly composure some-what, as though perhaps a load was off his mind. In a more normal voice—still twitching a bit, however—he said, “You have no idea how much better you'd feel if you could escape from gravity for a few years. Just no idea. Pull over, pull over here!” he shouted, and Pavel braked, alarmed, but seeing the solitary phone booth Schultz was pointing at—and as soon as he could, Schultz ran out, slamming the door, running to this phone booth out in the middle of nowhere. Pavel followed, holding the .38.

“Hello? Hello? Yes. Right. Absolutely. You're right.”

The phone had not been ringing before Schultz answered it. Pavel observed him. When the conversation was concluded, Schultz simply threw the receiver down to dangle, swinging back and forth, at the end of its cord. With a sudden movement he bent over, coming up—much to Pavel's surprise—with a live, wriggling rattlesnake, which he held right behind the head, chuckling evilly, hissing back at it, looking it in the face.